From the grand novel of Władysław Reymont, Krzysztof Garbaczewski picks out the issues related to the environment and emancipation, tracing the relationship between humans and the natural world, in his own way defining the need and meaning of work. In a multi-level production, he confronts the ideas of the writer with modern thought, creating a world of beings which are in part people, animals, and robots who seek a purpose for their existence. The world of Reymont’s Chłopi (The Peasants) shown by Garbaczewski is also an arena for performance arts depicting the drama of communities often functioning on the basis of violence towards women and relationships of exclusion.

The novel, which gave the author a Nobel Prize in 1924, illustrates the life of a fictional village of Lipce at the end of the 19th century. Usually read as an ethnographic record of the past, today it reveals anew its myth-making and creative power of language. The roots of Polish mentality, as described by historian Andrzej Leder, are in the provincial relation of “who holds the whip and whose back is whipped,” and goes on even further – into the depths of the human spirit, whose sense can be found in subordination to the eternal cycle of nature.